The disclosure relates to the field of network-based communication and information discovery and to network-based storage and management of network-accessible resources. More specifically, the disclosure relates to link clouds and user/community driven dynamic interlinking of resources.
In recent years, web-based systems such as Enterprise Information Portals have gained importance in many companies. Some of these systems integrate, as a single point of access, various applications and processes into one homogeneous user interface. Such systems can encompass a huge amount of content. Content of these systems are often not exclusively maintained by single, centralized entity. Instead Web 2.0 techniques may be used, allowing user generated content to be added. These systems can grow quickly and in a somewhat uncoordinated way as different users possess different knowledge and expertise and obey to different mental models. That is, the loosely coupled nature of Web 2.0 systems can be both a benefit for acquiring content and a hindrance for finding relevant content for a given user's needs.
In other words, the continuous growth of content systems where users are permitted to add content can makes it increasingly challenging to access relevant information, quickly. Hence, there is a disconnect between user needs and available tools. That is, users often need to find task and/or role-specific information quickly, yet these same users face information overload that can leaves them feeling lost in hyperspace. Consequently, users may not be able to locate resources that are potentially relevant to their tasks, simply because they never come across them.
The recent popularity of collaboration techniques on the Internet, particularly tagging and rating, provides new means for both semantically describing Web content and for indicating users' interests, preferences and contexts.
FIG. 1 shows basic structural components of a prior art hardware and software environment used for a prior art tagging-based method when searching for some content. In FIG. 1, a web client 10 (which may be one of large plurality of web clients) cooperates with a web server 12 during a user's search for content. Tags 14 are used for characterizing the content. There are many resources 16A . . . 16N available (accessible) by the searching user via a Web browser interface of Web client 10. Conventional tags 14 are often not selective enough for the needs of a searching user, which results in this user being able to find the best suited content only accidentally. That is, a user is generally unable to consistently find the best suited available content on a consistent basis when searching for a reasonable duration.
Problems can also result from different system users having different experience levels, when all of these users contribute tag content to a certain theme or topic. For example, a more expert user may know many details of a given theme, and will keep them unpublished (not tagged), because this user believes these details are self-evident. Other less expert users, however, who also contribute content to the Internet, may not know many basic or rudimentary details, which they will incorporate into the tag information. Such overly rudimentary details will not really be interesting for more advanced users, and may be distracting, thus making finding desired content in a reasonable duration challenging. Additionally, different users often use different terms, which may be synonyms to each other, or at least may be closely related in context of the content. Thus, different terms and different tags may exist, which are directed to the same content. Use of different, yet corresponding terms, for the same thing can make searching, tagging, and indexing difficult.